Social Hierarchy of Stalin's Soviet Union

The constitutions of 1918 and 1924 deprived whole categories of people of the right to vote or to be elected: those who hired labour for profit or lived on unearned income, private merchants and brokers, monks and clergy of all denominations, and the policemen and military officers of the old regime. The Bolsheviks used disenfranchisement as repression against those they classed as “enemies of the working people”, and decrees added new categories. A lishenets (plural lishentsy) lost far more than the vote: he could hold no government post, receive no higher or technical education, join no collective farm or other cooperative, and was denied the help others had for jobs, housing and pensions. The Constitution of 1936 brought universal suffrage and abolished the category.

Moving in or out. Local election commissions could restore a lishenets’s rights on proof of productive labour and loyalty to the Soviets; the Central Election Commission and the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee had the final word.

How many? Estimate: the categories the constitutions of 1918 and 1924 named, among them employers of hired labour, private traders, clergy and the old regime’s police and officers, and those added by later decrees; the articles give no count.

In Marxist–Leninist theory the kulaks, the better-off peasants, were class enemies of the poor. A decree of May 1929 defined a kulak household by hired labour, machinery, renting out equipment or trade; in Robert Conquest’s words, peasants with “a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors” were labelled kulaks. On 30 January 1930 the Politburo approved the dissolving of the kulaks as a class, sending them to the camps, to distant regions such as the north Urals and Kazakhstan, or elsewhere in their home provinces. In 1930 and 1931 alone 1,803,392 people were sent to labour colonies and camps. The deported and their families, “special settlers” as the government called them, lived on starvation rations, and many tried to escape.

Moving in or out. The OGPU told the deported that they would regain their rights in five years. Former kulaks and their families went on to make up the majority of the victims of the Great Purge of the late 1930s, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed.

How many? Estimate: 1,317,022 of the people deported as kulaks in 1930–1931 reached their destinations, 389,521 died in the colonies in 1932–1940, and deportations went on on a smaller scale; perhaps 1 to 1.5 million at mid-decade, of an estimated 150–180 million.

The Gulag, the Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps, was set up under the OGPU in 1930 and run by the NKVD from 1934. Its camps held ordinary criminals and political prisoners, many sentenced without trial by NKVD troikas; petty crimes and jokes about the government could bring a term, and Article 58 punished “counterrevolutionary activities”. Most camps lay in remote north-eastern Siberia, the far north and the steppes of Kazakhstan, where prisoners felled timber, mined, and built canals and railways. Naftaly Frenkel’s “nourishment scale”, which tied food to output, often killed weaker prisoners within weeks. From 1934 to 1940 deaths in the camps ran four to six times the Soviet average, and under NKVD Order No. 00447 tens of thousands of inmates were executed in 1937–1938.

Moving in or out. Between 1934 and 1953, 20 to 40 per cent of the prisoners were released each year, and good workers could earn early release; Naftaly Frenkel himself went from inmate to camp commander. On release many political prisoners were barred from the big cities and sent into exile in remote regions.

How many? Estimate: the camps and colonies held 1,196,369 people at the end of 1936 by the archival count and upwards of 1.6 million in 1939 (V. P. Kozlov), of an estimated 150–180 million.